Flutterbys: The Return

Funny things happen when you let furniture makers build yokes. . .

One of my favorite inclusions in a table top or a large panel is a "butterfly key." Intended to stop or prevent a split, they are usually about a half an inch thick and oriented across the grain of the panel.  Scribe the outline of the butterfly, chisel out the waste, then press or pound in the butterfly with glue or epoxy. That’s the basic gist of it, although there are a couple of tricks: drilling a small area at the bottom of the hole for excess glue to pool and beveling the edges so the butterfly fits more like a cork in a bottle are just two.

I got the idea to use butterflys on a yoke when I brought the mostly-finished, big elm yoke in to the basement woodshop and the super-dry air encouraged a large check. The butterflys looked pretty, but I wasn’t sure how long they would last.

After nearly 2 years and a lot working hours, I can absolutely report that

butterflys work in a yoke. In particularly dry weather you can see the check enlarge around the butterflies, while in the summer months the check nearly disappears. I can't imagine the yoke surviving this long without the keys.

I don’t know if there’s a perfect wood species for making butterflies. The cherry ones are a nice contrast with the elm and the hickory one looks like a bit of a mismatch. Let aesthetics be your guide if you like, but "pretty is as pretty does" in this case. 

A Pandemic Story

 “Never let a good crisis go to waste”- Winston Churchill

I'm up early and getting around to teach Oxen Driving at Tillers. It's one of my favorite, annual signs of spring.  One year ago, it was the last thing I did before the pandemic shut most everything down.  

It was hard. All of it. I'll spare you those details. You've got your own.

But, a year on from that weekend, my oxen are in much better shape than they were last march. As a driver, so am I. Not a little better in either case. Twice as good. Enough so that I am a little embarrassed about how bad we were then- and I would have said we were pretty good at that time.

What made the difference? Time for sure.  Tom Jenkins told me, "There's not too many problems that can't be fixed with more time in the yoke." The other x-factor is commitment to getting better. What Angela Duckworth calls "grit." Not some magical quality of internal drive, but more like dripping water that eventually wears away stone. The recognition that, with time and incremental progress, we'll get better- because it's important.

We still have our bad days, but dragging the pasture last night with Brutus back from a foot injury, they were good enough that it felt like cheating. I wasn't driving them, just working alongside them. In the state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow."

Churchill may have been on to something. What's your story?

Remind me to. . .

I often ask Cara, "remind me to . . ." The ellipses could be replaced with anything from "pick up The Half Blood Prince from the library" to "close the garage door."  

She does. Right then. It's our joke. Then I forget to do the task.
  

Why do I mention it? I'm making a new 11-inch yoke from laminated yellow pine.  And I wonder how long it takes to make a yoke, start-to-finish.

I know a couple of things: 1. Dave Kramer demonstrated yoke-making last summer when I helped teach Oxen Basics and, man, is he fast. Jimmy Johns fast. 2. Most people estimate that tasks will take half as long as they do. Really. We'd never start them otherwise.

So far, I took about 45 minutes to lay out the pattern on the first

section. I was working slowly and adjusting the template dimensions and shape a bit as I went. 

Next, each of the center three sections took 10 minutes to cut out with my very sweet Festool jigsaw. (standard MODA Blog disclaimer: I bought it at retail and get no kickback. And it's still sweet).  Add 10 more minutes to move sawhorses, etc. and I have less than 1.5 hours so far.

Remind me to keep a running total of the time.

But don't do it right now. I'll forget.

The jigsaw leaves a smoooooth finish.

Good TV

 If you watch enough good TV*, you'll come across the same few teams of oxen.  When you think about it, it's little wonder. Hollywood doesn't need 100 teams in any given season, so the same animals work in a number of contexts.  

Luke Conner told me that he prefers solid color animals for movie work, since they can easily be 're-used' in multiple shots. I told him that I always joke with my high school students that his oxen were traitors: They clearly fought on both sides in the American Revolution- sometimes pulling British Wagons, others Continental farm equipment in the show Turn: Washington's Spies. Using black Swiss-Holstein crosses made it an unlikely catch by most viewers used to bad TV**.

This fact stood out as I watched some of M*A*S*H*, Season 5 on Hulu.  Within the first few episodes, the same ox was working both as a single and in a span. With multiple owners. The traitor.

At least M*A*S*H* now qualifies as good TV. What else do you watch that qualifies as Good TV?

*  Good TV: TV with Oxen featured regularly.
** Bad TV: TV without Oxen featured regularly

Hay Staging

 All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

              -William Shakespeare As You Like it

When words act as multiple parts of speech, I get excited. This week we staged some round bales. "Staged," as in placed them in position to be fed later. But to keep them off the ground and make unwrapping the net easier, we placed them on a "stage," in this case, a pallet.

A lucky guess on where the flat spot would land.

It's a fun task to "stage" round bales- with all that hooking and unhooking.  The basic set of steps is this:

1. Pull the stone boat up next to the bale (in this case, the bales had a flat spot, so we judged where the boat needed to be to have the bale land correctly.

2. Hook a hay hook into the netting and run a chain over the bale.

3. Move the team so they are oriented perpendicularly to the stone boat.

4. Link an additional chain onto the "hook chain" and hitch it to the yoke.

5. Take just enough steps to roll the bale on to the boat. (Normally, I like to leave the bale with the axis pointing skyward right on the stone boat and feed it like that, but it does tie up the stone boat for the next few days and it means you can only move one bale at a time.)

5. Pull the bale to the staging area. (In our case, next to the pasture fence. We peel and feed hay 2x a day.)

6. Throw a pallet down behind the stoneboat.

7. Repeat steps 1-5 to roll the bale up onto the pallet. (In this case, the axis is skyward, making unwrapping easier)

8. Hook to the stone boat and go back for another.

Like I said, lots of hooking and unhooking.  Half the time the team hooks they have a heavy pull, as they are pulling the bale and the boat. The other half, they are flopping a bale, which I could realistically do myself.  That's nice. It makes the team pull "gently," no matter what.

. . . And if the senior Senator from Vermont offers to help, let him.

Penguin Walking

 

Looks fine.  So does a mine field.

When I was in my middle-20's, like everyone else, I knew I was invincible. But an icy trip to the mailbox did its best to disabuse me of that notion. I can still see it in slow motion: One minute I was up. The next, I was down in a heap. All that was missing was the Wile E. Coyote swirls in the air as my feet, no doubt, reached shoulder height.

This time of year, I'm likely to heed to warnings to "walk like a penguin" on the ice. (See diagram)

As a result, I'm always reluctant to get the boys out when it's icy. The catastrophic costs simply outweigh the benefits.  (Warning: the story at this link is gut-wrenching .) Yesterday, though, we were in that grey area between penguin walking weather and skip-to-the-mailbox weather. The ice had mostly cleared, but the lack of snow had frozen the ground just below the surface. Most places were fine, but the few slight slopes were sketchy at best.

As a result, everyone got a lead rope to the hitching post and back. Taking a chance at Zeus's natural exuberance seemed foolhardy. Walking up and down the slopes and on the icier areas, I walked directly in front of the team to keep the pace indolent. We skipped hauling out a round bale, knowing that they'd need to dig in and pull and we'd be walking at a good clip to do that.  

Live to fight another day.  Last evening's snow appears to have insulated the ground enough to thaw the frozen layer, but I'll walk out like a penguin before getting the boys.

Be Annoying

"I'm not touching you!" *Holds fingers inches from your face*

                                                - Every sibling in history

I enjoy bugging the pets. The dogs have to endure photos with costumes and hats. Same with the oxen. I probably have more oxen-hat-photos than you have oxen photos. Really. 

I also make a regular practice of running hands on the cattle.  A hand around a horn sometimes.  A push of a head. Little things to remind them that I intend to hold my status as the biggest, strongest ox of them all.  As long as they believe it, I'm good. Much of that could reasonably be argued as training.  

But I also have a general propensity to annoy the boys. They have to listen to show tunes when I feel like singing. (In my defense, if there is a bright golden haze on the meadow, it bears mentioning.) 

I also often rub their eyes.  If they've got debris in the corners of their eyes, I brush it out. When we stop for a break, I massage both eyes, my hands rubbing each closed eye while they have to stand and put up with it. Sometimes, I think it calms them down. Others, it calms me and they just have to put up with it. I never thought of it as training. But Cassius has pink-eye.

The vet gave him a prescription.  "A 1/4 inch bead in each eye, every 8 hours, for 8 days." With an 8 year-old, 2000+lb. ox, that sounded a whole lot like: "Aim for some ointment to hit the eye while dodging horns and hooves as the animal dances around looking for an escape route with the one good eye not yet affected by the pink-eye."  

But off I trudged, halter in hand to find the boy in the pasture. "Cassius, head up." Up came his head to take the halter. "C'mon," and we walked to a fence post where I tied him pretty short and tight. 

Then came the moment of truth: He squinted a bit, and would have preferred that I didn't try too hard to hold his eye open. But he stood like a gentleman for both eyes.  

A few days into this, our routine has changed only a little. I've taken to putting his halter on, dropping the lead rope on the ground, and stepping on it.  That little bit of tug keeps him in place. I'm 90% sure that he'd stand for me doing it without any halter, but why risk it? If he never learns he can get away, he never learns he can get away.

So be annoying. And the eye is looking better.